Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey guys, welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your mind. This is Julie Douglas and not with us
Speaker 1: today is Robert Lamb, who unfortunately is suffering from a
Speaker 1: really kind of horrendous case of laryngitis. So that is
Speaker 1: why you do not hear his dulcet tones today. So
Speaker 1: we thought we would rerun a favorite of hours for
Speaker 1: you guys if you haven't heard it before. It is
Speaker 1: all about wind breaking. That's right, farts. The status afflatus
Speaker 1: is the actual name of this episode, and we hope
Speaker 1: that you guys enjoy it. But before we get into
Speaker 1: it and we get into the why and the how
Speaker 1: of farts, I want to mention that there have always
Speaker 1: been historically champions of windbreaking. Yes, I am talking about
Speaker 1: Jonathan Swift, a master of satire and the author of
Speaker 1: Gulliver's Travels. Well. He wrote an essay titled The Benefit
Speaker 1: of Farting Explained. This was published in seventeen twenty two,
Speaker 1: and in it he says it is translated into English
Speaker 1: at the request and for the use of the Lady
Speaker 1: damp Fart or her fought Shire by Obadiah Fizzle groom
Speaker 1: of the stool to the Princess of us Many in Sardinia. Ah,
Speaker 1: there you go. And we also had Benjamin Franklin, who
Speaker 1: in seventeen eighty one, when he found out that the
Speaker 1: Royal Academy at Brussels was requesting a scientific essay and
Speaker 1: would award prizes for the best papers, he said, Hey,
Speaker 1: here's an essay urging the Academy to discover some drug
Speaker 1: wholesome and not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common
Speaker 1: food or sauces that shall render the natural discharges of
Speaker 1: wind from our bodies not only inoffensive, but agreeable as perfumes. Alright, folks,
Speaker 1: I think that's evidence enough that we've been thinking about
Speaker 1: this topic for a long time, and that people have
Speaker 1: been rethinking it in terms of it being not so
Speaker 1: bad of a thing, pretty natural, right in According to
Speaker 1: Dr Patricia Raymond, she's an assistant professor of Clinical and
Speaker 1: internal medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk. She says,
Speaker 1: if you pass gas, in most cases, you're eating more
Speaker 1: healthfully than your friends who aren't passing gas, or at
Speaker 1: least as much, I suppose, And she says that it
Speaker 1: should be a badge of honor. So wind break on,
Speaker 1: my friends, wind break on, Julie. What does a fire
Speaker 1: breathing dragon have to do with the human digestion system?
Speaker 1: A lot, it turns out, in fact, it has a
Speaker 1: lot to do with gas and belching. And you guys
Speaker 1: know that we we promised that we would roll out
Speaker 1: an episode about inflate us, about gas, the toots parts,
Speaker 1: you name it. If you promised, it was like a
Speaker 1: blood oath to our listeners that we would do a
Speaker 1: fart episode. But no one asked for by the way,
Speaker 1: no well, no one ever asked for it, but it happens.
Speaker 1: And so here it is an entire episode devoted to
Speaker 1: the the interesting science of of cutting one as it were.
Speaker 1: You said that with a question mark. I think it's no,
Speaker 1: it's definitely interesting science. I think it comes down to
Speaker 1: the individual listener. I mean, what, what is your individual
Speaker 1: relationship with gas and A? Are you the type of
Speaker 1: person who is repelled enough to where no amount of
Speaker 1: interesting science is really going to make you respect flateut
Speaker 1: in any way? Or do you? Or do you? Are
Speaker 1: you already totally on board? And in science, the coding
Speaker 1: of science can only make flateus all the more exciting.
Speaker 1: My feeling is that everybody does it, so everybody should
Speaker 1: have an interest in it. Well, everybody does it, but
Speaker 1: people do it to different degrees, and people do it
Speaker 1: with with varying degrees of pride or or or disgrace. Well.
Speaker 1: As as I've shared before, I come from a various
Speaker 1: schatological family, so this is a topic that has been
Speaker 1: plumbed in the family. I'm not scared to talk about it.
Speaker 1: And uh, I feel like there's lots of really great
Speaker 1: information here, in particular this idea of this fire breathing dragon,
Speaker 1: and this is fascinating to me. This was in Mary
Speaker 1: Richard's Gulp. She spoke with a herpetologist, steven S Corp,
Speaker 1: who became fixated on the question of why a python
Speaker 1: or a boa has an unusually large see Okay, so
Speaker 1: I see someone like this little digestive pouch. It's near
Speaker 1: the colon and normally you see it implant eating animals,
Speaker 1: and so he became obsessed with it. Why why which
Speaker 1: is a python have this? So he tried to figure
Speaker 1: out the role of the season, whether or not it
Speaker 1: was just there, to break down the plant material in
Speaker 1: the animal that the python had just ingested. Um, and
Speaker 1: he began to actually measure the amount of hydrogen coming
Speaker 1: out of a python. Example, like what it was exhaling.
Speaker 1: Affort was given a bunch of rats to eat, okay,
Speaker 1: So he did that with something called a chromatograph, and
Speaker 1: that measured the amount of hydrogen alright. What he actually
Speaker 1: found out, though, was that the amount of hydrogen that
Speaker 1: was being exhaled by these creatures was enormous. And I
Speaker 1: think about this hydrogen concentration is flammable. These guys and
Speaker 1: gals were exhaling something about okay, so what does any
Speaker 1: of us have to do with belching or gas or
Speaker 1: inflate us. Well, it turns out Seaquar has this really
Speaker 1: great theory that early Man would stumble across, say, a
Speaker 1: python that had just or was in the middle of
Speaker 1: digesting a gazelle, and so as you know, the python
Speaker 1: would be useless and trying to defend itself. Corrects just
Speaker 1: eating this huge meal. Bloated. It's not gonna immediately runoff.
Speaker 1: I never rum for another one, right, So early man says,
Speaker 1: easy food. I've got dinner tonight. I have two things
Speaker 1: for dinner tonight, right, I think that Mary Rich had
Speaker 1: described it as Neanderthal for Duncan. Okay, so early man
Speaker 1: or woman hauls us off to a campsite, there's a fire,
Speaker 1: someone is being you know, joyful, and they began to say,
Speaker 1: step on this python's head or they kick it, and
Speaker 1: what happens. A huge flood of this hydrogen just rolls
Speaker 1: out of the mouth, meets the fire, and then and
Speaker 1: then you have a fire breathing reptile. Yeah. So she
Speaker 1: course says, think about the thousands and thousands of years
Speaker 1: of these tales of bringing down a fire breathing giant
Speaker 1: to your campsite, because I could see, on one hand,
Speaker 1: someone could be like, whoa that thing can can breathe fire?
Speaker 1: I was really I was. I was really lucky that
Speaker 1: I didn't get toasted back there, or they'd see what
Speaker 1: happened and they realized, well, this thing doesn't actually breathe fire,
Speaker 1: but it sure didn't look like it. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to claim that it does because I look all the
Speaker 1: more awesome for having killed it. Slay it. Right, and
Speaker 1: I fast forward, you know, fifty years to modern humans
Speaker 1: in eight year olds, all around camp fires trying to
Speaker 1: light their farts, right, there. We have a long tradition
Speaker 1: of this relationship with gas and man. Yeah, anybody who's
Speaker 1: read Mary Roaches Packing from Mars book about the space
Speaker 1: program and human space exploration. Uh Now, so there's a
Speaker 1: there's a lot of scatological content in here, because you're
Speaker 1: talking about sending humans and their digestive systems up into
Speaker 1: a strange environment that doesn't necessarily play by the rules,
Speaker 1: and at the very least is contained within a very
Speaker 1: small space, and inevitably you have astronauts that are going
Speaker 1: to pass gas and uh. I believe it was measured
Speaker 1: out to be like three coke cans worth of worth
Speaker 1: of gas is coming out. So there were a couple
Speaker 1: of interesting bits they're involving NASA research. One was a
Speaker 1: quest of by um Edwin Murphy UH in an attempt
Speaker 1: to find what what the ideal fart profile for an
Speaker 1: anstro NOTT would be UM and basically they wanted a
Speaker 1: little or no methane or hydrogen, because, as we just
Speaker 1: touched on, hydrogen is explosive and methane is not desirable either.
Speaker 1: But in his work, this guy Murphy had apparently encountered
Speaker 1: one ideal astronaut candidate and then this is the quote
Speaker 1: of special interest for further research was the subject who
Speaker 1: produced essentially no flateut on one grams dry weight of beans,
Speaker 1: as opposed to the average gut, which will during a
Speaker 1: peak of flash ones period five or six hours post
Speaker 1: being consumption passed anywhere from one to almost three cups
Speaker 1: of latest per hour. So, uh, that is particularly interesting.
Speaker 1: Interesting not only because NASA that you know wants that
Speaker 1: ideal fart profile for an astronaut, or or that you
Speaker 1: know you would given the chance, but that there are
Speaker 1: individuals that are almost non farthers, which is interesting. It
Speaker 1: is amazing to me because I mean, presumably again everybody
Speaker 1: does this, and I do think it's very kind of NASA,
Speaker 1: by the way, to try to recruit people who don't
Speaker 1: do it so much, because, as we discussed in our
Speaker 1: Emotions in Space episode, you can get dicey up there,
Speaker 1: and if you're next to someone who keeps putt putting,
Speaker 1: you know, for six months straight, that that can make
Speaker 1: things very tense. So let's talk about fart What is it? Well, basically,
Speaker 1: the act of farting, of course, is the means by
Speaker 1: which the body rids the colon of unwanted gas. And
Speaker 1: by virtue of that unwanted pressure, you have this gas
Speaker 1: that builds up and the average person releases between five
Speaker 1: and two thousand milli liters of this per day. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, what does it consist of? Well, about its
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, and methane and go again,
Speaker 1: varying degrees of that depending on the particular fart parton
Speaker 1: because some people don't produce methane. I think it's like
Speaker 1: only one third of us produce methane yep. And most
Speaker 1: of these gases are either swallowed inadvertently when you're eating
Speaker 1: your food or released from the food as it is digested.
Speaker 1: And uh, it's amazing because when it's in your body
Speaker 1: it is odorless, and we don't think of it as
Speaker 1: being odorless. Right. And the other key thing that of
Speaker 1: the ingredients that I just listed that is odorless, all
Speaker 1: the hydrogen, the methane, oxygen, all of it, that is
Speaker 1: not the odor using content. It is that that is
Speaker 1: responsible for the smell. Yeah, we'll get to that one
Speaker 1: percent in a bit. Yeah, spend such a political term
Speaker 1: in days. One percent. That's kind of funny to the
Speaker 1: whole system exactly. Um, So, as you had mentioned we
Speaker 1: do expel quite a bit of it. That the man
Speaker 1: who inspired really thoughtful study of how much we expel
Speaker 1: and even excessive gas is a man who in nine
Speaker 1: complained of a five year epic bout of the twots
Speaker 1: he Um. He contacted gas from entrologist Michael Levitt, and
Speaker 1: in order to study the man, Lovett had to create
Speaker 1: a baseline of normal flattist output so or flatists, I
Speaker 1: should say, he recruited volunteers to keep flat too, graphic logs,
Speaker 1: logs of gas activity, recording every stirring in every output.
Speaker 1: He prefers that actually, but he did, and others have
Speaker 1: relied on um studies that use a rectal tube in
Speaker 1: collection syringes to determine average output. That is year old
Speaker 1: way of trying to figure out how much people are expelling.
Speaker 1: So basically the the farting in a jar scenario. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but a little bit more foolproof and a lot more
Speaker 1: going on, and the syringes there just to extract the
Speaker 1: molecules and then to to figure out what sort of
Speaker 1: molecules are in there. Um. These days, hydrogen output is
Speaker 1: measured in the breath because a fixed percentage of hydrogen
Speaker 1: produced in the colon, is absorbed into the blood, and
Speaker 1: when it reaches the lungs, it's exhaled. Now, what he
Speaker 1: found was that this man was passing gas thirty four
Speaker 1: to forty two times a day. Okay, the baseline average
Speaker 1: here of the humans who doesn't have any lactose intolerance
Speaker 1: problems is about fourteen to twenty times a day in
Speaker 1: case you're wondering. So the problem that they've finally figured
Speaker 1: out is that he was lactose intolerant. And as we
Speaker 1: learned before, lactose does not get broken down for some
Speaker 1: people in the digestive excuse me, in the small intestines
Speaker 1: hangs out in the colon, and then you have other
Speaker 1: bacteria which we're breaking that down, and then you've got
Speaker 1: the waste product of that bacteria, and you've got a
Speaker 1: bunch of bunch of bunch of hydrogen being produced there. Yes,
Speaker 1: of course, we're talking about humans as a whole in
Speaker 1: regards to UH to flate us. But you can't help
Speaker 1: but get into gender scenarios when you start thinking about
Speaker 1: In fact, one of the articles that we were looking
Speaker 1: at UH the art, the author made a point of
Speaker 1: saying that men as as a whole. And she's really
Speaker 1: generalizing here and painting with a very broad brush, and
Speaker 1: I skilled her for it that all men are just
Speaker 1: enthusiastic about their gas and just love it and crave
Speaker 1: it and and laugh at it all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and model it. Really, I am not one of those men.
Speaker 1: Like maybe that is the more baseline relationship between men
Speaker 1: and fart, but I, for my own self, I don't
Speaker 1: engage that style of humor. For the most part, I
Speaker 1: will laugh at a fart joke if it is well
Speaker 1: crafted um or in some way, you know, insightful. Um.
Speaker 1: There have been occasionally they'll get me, like the Pristance.
Speaker 1: There was a Sarah Silverman Show episode that was very
Speaker 1: far heavy. She's she likes the farts. Yeah, and occasionally
Speaker 1: that will work. I mean it's it's the right fart shop.
Speaker 1: But as a whole, I do not. I'm more of
Speaker 1: a stereotypical If you're gonna go with these stereotypes, I'm
Speaker 1: more of a stereotypical woman when it comes to fart
Speaker 1: gags and in self gas production than a stereotypical man. Okay,
Speaker 1: so what I'm hearing is that you don't have a
Speaker 1: cellar full of darts. No, I do not. Okay, all right,
Speaker 1: this is good um. And it's interesting that you bring
Speaker 1: out the stereotypes because you know, if it's were the
Speaker 1: Victorian age, we would say, oh, well, women just don't
Speaker 1: produce gas at all, right, it wouldn't even be a question.
Speaker 1: But we do have data on it, and it turns
Speaker 1: out that women have are seemed to be expelling more
Speaker 1: gas than men as measured by the hydrogen exhaled. But
Speaker 1: Mary Roach questions this and says in her book, could
Speaker 1: it be that the suppression of gas could lead to
Speaker 1: a higher input of hydrogen exhalation? So maybe if you're
Speaker 1: going with the stereotypical um, I almos, dont want to
Speaker 1: say stereotypical female, but let's say, let's go with if
Speaker 1: you're going with a fart avoidant person like myself, then
Speaker 1: they are going to be less inclined to just let
Speaker 1: it rip whenever the mood hits them. Right, So if
Speaker 1: you suppress it, then you're going to absorb more of
Speaker 1: it through your bloodstream and then you're going to exhale mark. Oh,
Speaker 1: so the way you're kind of reversing it and farting
Speaker 1: into your body, into your bloods you're just breath farting, okay, right,
Speaker 1: and that makes it really a lovely thought, doesn't it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think about that next time you you give your
Speaker 1: significant other nice little kiss. Yeah, you know, I I do.
Speaker 1: I should add one point about that ladies and farting.
Speaker 1: I did work in a newspaper once and an individual
Speaker 1: in the front office was terminated for engaging in a
Speaker 1: farting contest with a with a with a customer. It
Speaker 1: was it was quite understand it. It seems like it
Speaker 1: was mutual farting. So I guess it was just like, hey,
Speaker 1: this is a we're going to make an example of you.
Speaker 1: We just fart with the customer. Maybe, you know, there
Speaker 1: could have been some other politics involved, or maybe it
Speaker 1: was just kind of this unwritten rule where if your
Speaker 1: customer comes in and celebrates his or her farts, that's fine,
Speaker 1: but then you were not supposed to then engage with
Speaker 1: them in a contest of farts or you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of like it's it's okay, the customer uses
Speaker 1: foul language to a point, but you're in then not
Speaker 1: supposed to engage them in that kind of behavior. I guess, well,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe she showed him up. Maybe she shamed him
Speaker 1: and they lost a customer because of it. Was this
Speaker 1: a gastrontrology office, No, this was a newspaper with We
Speaker 1: didn't even have a flatest section, you know, just business
Speaker 1: and sports. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know that I can
Speaker 1: recover from that story. I feel like I need time
Speaker 1: to think about that and chuckle. But we must go on,
Speaker 1: so I'm just gonna chuckle about that later. Um, all right,
Speaker 1: so let's talk about this or should we take a break?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, let's take a break. Why not. When we
Speaker 1: come back, we will discuss the one percent of the
Speaker 1: fart that is responsible for the smell. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: extraordinary cases of flateust. We'll talk about people who have
Speaker 1: elevated um passing gas to an art form, and also
Speaker 1: the big question, if you're in microgravity, can you propel
Speaker 1: yourself across a space ship just by virtue of your own? Uh? Flateus? Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So, as we've discussed of FLATEUS is carbon dioxide, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,
Speaker 1: and methane. And uh these are coming from stuff that
Speaker 1: either gases that are inadvertently swallowed or it's released from
Speaker 1: the food as we're digesting it. But none of it
Speaker 1: produces the signature odors and it varies certainly, as we
Speaker 1: can attest to. None of these elements contribute to the odor.
Speaker 1: Is just a tiny one that makes the gas so foul,
Speaker 1: that's right, that creates that singular bouquet of smell. Micros
Speaker 1: really live for the most part in the colon, where
Speaker 1: they attack and consume undigested food and in turn generate
Speaker 1: their own waste products. So in the case of microorganisms,
Speaker 1: waste usually means gas, and in the case of these
Speaker 1: microorganism organisms, that gas can be the really ripe stuff,
Speaker 1: usually molecules containing sulfur like dimethyl sulfide and method methyl um.
Speaker 1: These are waste products that ferment and they build up
Speaker 1: to a sufficient level and then they're released with the
Speaker 1: rest of the gas in the bowels. And by the way,
Speaker 1: we talked about this before, the birth of a fart
Speaker 1: happens when uh, you're stretch receptors um in your colon
Speaker 1: send a signal to your brain, Hey, I'm having some discomfort,
Speaker 1: and then this fincter is loosened up and and and
Speaker 1: the message maybe when you get a chance, please do
Speaker 1: something about this or maybe this is really important. So
Speaker 1: the next time you even have like a heavy thought
Speaker 1: in the back of your head, um, we're gonna just
Speaker 1: go ahead and let it go, even a heavy Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. The brain will sit there and respond and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: now you gotta tampa down, sorry, spincter, or yep, we're
Speaker 1: overloaded here alright. So what brave soul figured out the
Speaker 1: scent profile of flatus. Well, the same Michael Levitt who
Speaker 1: helped to determine the output of late us also studies
Speaker 1: the qualities of gas. These smell profiles, he recruited volunteers
Speaker 1: to detect the three main elements of a heart so
Speaker 1: hydrogen sulfide, which is described as the scent of rotten
Speaker 1: eggs uh meth and methiel that is described as rotting vegetation,
Speaker 1: and dimethyl sulfide, which is oddly described as sweet mhm. Yes.
Speaker 1: So he didn't do this as a cruel joke. I mean,
Speaker 1: he wasn't just trying to you know, terrorize people with smells.
Speaker 1: He wanted to see if the noxiousness of the scent
Speaker 1: would correlate with the combined concentrations of these three types
Speaker 1: of sulfur gases and it did. So the best part
Speaker 1: of this, all this information is he took the data
Speaker 1: and he reversed engineer to fart so he could use
Speaker 1: the combined concentrations in other scenarios. Would would it be
Speaker 1: safe to call this a frank and fart? Yes, it
Speaker 1: would be absolutely Um it's a frank and fart. And
Speaker 1: he wanted to figure out the absorptive properties of charcoal
Speaker 1: underpants or seat pads, which, by the way, is of
Speaker 1: interest to the airline industry. Which makes sense, right, I
Speaker 1: think that I said, go, airline industry, put charcoal in
Speaker 1: the seat pad. Any degree to which you can cut
Speaker 1: down on the on the amount of flatus in that
Speaker 1: enclosed space on a long flight, the better, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: In speaking of a long fight or a spacewalk, NASA
Speaker 1: actually has used filters in the air circulation in space
Speaker 1: suits with charcoal to help bind sulfur and then prevent
Speaker 1: the astronauts from getting drive by farted every time the
Speaker 1: air is recirculated. Yeah, because if they build up enough
Speaker 1: along enough space walk, then fart madness ensues. I've heard
Speaker 1: about fart madness, isn't earth. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: I was looking on snopes to see if there were
Speaker 1: any particular urban legends related to the farting of note,
Speaker 1: and one of them was this bit that occasionally circulates
Speaker 1: an emails about a man who who died because he
Speaker 1: farted under the covers and uh and had the covers
Speaker 1: up over his head. But that's just complete malarkey. That's
Speaker 1: just a Dutch Oven. Yes, so so yeah, so death
Speaker 1: by by death by by Dutch Oven not really a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you can't try to, I mean, just for fun
Speaker 1: Dutch Oven astronauts, right, No, No, I mean they go
Speaker 1: through enough in the training. I'm sure they were, like,
Speaker 1: you know, after you've been in that spinny thing than
Speaker 1: I mean, we've all seen the right stuff. They went
Speaker 1: through a lot of horrible things to to prove themselves
Speaker 1: and to and to you know, to get their bodies
Speaker 1: in shape and prepare themselves for this this experience in orbit.
Speaker 1: So and keep in mind that the air in their
Speaker 1: space suits is actually recirculated three times a minute. So
Speaker 1: now another interesting bit from Mary Roach's book, Packing for Mars.
Speaker 1: She talked to an astronaut by the name of Roger Crouch,
Speaker 1: and he was particularly interested in the idea of propelling
Speaker 1: yourself through a microgravity environment like aboard the space station
Speaker 1: via your own farts, and he said that the mass
Speaker 1: and velocity of the expelled gas is very small compared
Speaker 1: to the mass of the human body. So he tested
Speaker 1: it out found that it produced no real effect, though
Speaker 1: he did, uh, he did have this theory that the
Speaker 1: underpants and the pants might be um prohibiting the expulsion
Speaker 1: of gas, and so he but he did not get
Speaker 1: to test this naked, but he apparently has lingering thoughts
Speaker 1: that that nude farting in Mike gravity would potentially give
Speaker 1: you at least a little push across the cabin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that really is not going to win the hearts and
Speaker 1: minds of your fellow astronauts or space if you just
Speaker 1: drop trial and then try to propel yourself with your
Speaker 1: own parts. Can you imagine the dudas doing like the
Speaker 1: crying in space videos and all the different viral videos
Speaker 1: Colonel have Feld, Yeah, I wonder, I wonder if he's
Speaker 1: on board for this. That's gonna be a big shock
Speaker 1: when that when that YouTube video rolls out, that might
Speaker 1: be the one that never really makes it to be right. So, though,
Speaker 1: if you were going to do that experiment without underpants
Speaker 1: and really truly tested, you would want to eat the
Speaker 1: gassiest inducing foods that you could. And it turns out
Speaker 1: that the most eruptive edibles are beans, carrots, raisins, bananas
Speaker 1: just odd to me onions not odd milk and milk
Speaker 1: products for the very reasons that we talked before about
Speaker 1: milk being hard to digest and break down as opposed
Speaker 1: to something like um, what say, meat, fish, great berries,
Speaker 1: these are these have the least amount of complex carbohydrates.
Speaker 1: It's it's this, uh, this really damning conundrum that that
Speaker 1: I that I have encountered, and then I think a
Speaker 1: number of people encountered that the healthier that you try
Speaker 1: to eat. You know, you're trying, you're trying to eat
Speaker 1: all these vegetables and these whole grains and lintels and beans,
Speaker 1: and it's just it's making you're gassier, and you feel
Speaker 1: like you're being punished for this diet. Uh. Dr Robert
Speaker 1: Lustig even put it this way. He said, in life,
Speaker 1: you have two choices, it's either fat or fart. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's true, like if you were to radically change your
Speaker 1: diet from say a meat and a very little um
Speaker 1: vegetable diet to grains and vegetables. You would really need
Speaker 1: to set aside a couple of days to transition into that. Kid.
Speaker 1: You not, Well, there's that great Portlandia sketch where they
Speaker 1: go to the restaurant that has the raw food. It's
Speaker 1: like an all raw food place, and they actually have
Speaker 1: a a flateist patio with fans, the patio far patio.
Speaker 1: That is just one of my favorite things, one of
Speaker 1: those that that clip is just great because it's not
Speaker 1: hearty horror laugh laugh, but it kind of speaks to
Speaker 1: that whole experience when you do go to a rough
Speaker 1: foods restaurant or a vegan restaurant and the result of
Speaker 1: that afterwards, they just kind of brought it more to
Speaker 1: the forefront. Yeah, it's it's a it's a clever bit
Speaker 1: of of parody there and uh and and commentary. So
Speaker 1: that's that is a fart gag that I at least
Speaker 1: chuckle that sure, because really, when you get down to it,
Speaker 1: every restaurant should have a fart patio. Now, as we
Speaker 1: mentioned before, you you have a very rare individual like
Speaker 1: the the individual that NASA uncovered who barely farted at all.
Speaker 1: Just the one person in the world, the one person
Speaker 1: this mutant that that barely produces any flatus. But then
Speaker 1: there is there's another side of that coin as well.
Speaker 1: There the super fartre's the the extraordinary flat went individuals
Speaker 1: that that make life so interesting. There's just thought that
Speaker 1: some people have types of bacteria that produce more sulfur
Speaker 1: than other people, so that could be part of it.
Speaker 1: Diet is certainly part of it. And then of course,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned earlier, some people are gonna have different
Speaker 1: concentrations of hydrogen and methane, so some people are going
Speaker 1: to be more explosive, which is UH. And I feel
Speaker 1: like we've discussed this before, but it's it's more of
Speaker 1: a serious issue when there's some sort of surgical procedure
Speaker 1: going on, you know, with the colon UH in which
Speaker 1: you're going to have to cauterize wounds with a heat element.
Speaker 1: That heat element plus hydrogen methane that's built up that
Speaker 1: can have literally an explosive reaction, which is not good
Speaker 1: for anybody involved in that procedure. Now, I believe there's
Speaker 1: an ignoble prize that was given out this right, that's
Speaker 1: where we discussed it before, but we Normally we say
Speaker 1: it's just it's really very funny stuff, but this one
Speaker 1: um study was very serious because like, you know, what
Speaker 1: if if you are doing this procedure on someone, if
Speaker 1: someone has a pole up and you're moving it, uh,
Speaker 1: you don't want them to explode and die, right, So
Speaker 1: that's that's one of the things that doctors have been
Speaker 1: really cognizant of, and these days they actually pipe in
Speaker 1: a little air um and air that doesn't have flammable
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide as well to try to dilute any methane
Speaker 1: or hydrogen that might be left over. Although for anybody
Speaker 1: who's gone to the guts or intrologists and and had
Speaker 1: one of these procedures like a colonoscopy, then you know
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of prep work ahead of time
Speaker 1: to try to remove anything that might antagonize or create
Speaker 1: a spark in your rectum. Another aspect of inflate us
Speaker 1: in in the medical community is that it can actually
Speaker 1: be used as a disease fighter sort of. I mean
Speaker 1: it's more like a canary in the coal mine, So
Speaker 1: doctors can actually identify toughest spot viral or bacterial infections
Speaker 1: of the gut in someone's gas So what they do
Speaker 1: is they just perform this test where they collect a
Speaker 1: stool sample and then they try to take the gases
Speaker 1: um and they extract those gases from a aren't needle
Speaker 1: and then they figure out the flateus molecules and the
Speaker 1: machine then will analyze these molecules and tell you what
Speaker 1: the infection. Is. Pretty cool. That is pretty cool. Discussing
Speaker 1: the various smell profiles of human flatus UH and ultimately
Speaker 1: human waste. I keep coming back to horse excrement because really,
Speaker 1: if you smelled horse excrement, it's really the best excrement
Speaker 1: out there, you know, Like if you had to be
Speaker 1: around a bunch of poop all day, it's really hard
Speaker 1: to go wrong with horse. Yeah, Or you used to
Speaker 1: used to work at a zoo, so you know that
Speaker 1: there are various odors related to different different animals leavings,
Speaker 1: and some of them were more pleasant than others. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it was funny because I worked in the administrative building,
Speaker 1: but the keepers would come in and they had all
Speaker 1: sorts of smell molecules stuck to their bodies. So they
Speaker 1: might have been working with the Zeeber's that day, who knows,
Speaker 1: But they passed by the elephants, and that took it
Speaker 1: all down. So the elephant not a good smell profile.
Speaker 1: But the horse, the horse, I think is a good
Speaker 1: good smell profile. So what do you think about the
Speaker 1: latest artist? Ah? Yes, do you think they're even concerned
Speaker 1: with the scent profile? Well, it's it's interesting because first
Speaker 1: of all, I should I should back up and say
Speaker 1: that I was not aware of this until about a
Speaker 1: year ago. I was recovering from Wisdom Tooth Removal, and
Speaker 1: I was I was on pain pills and I was
Speaker 1: taking I was reading the book Madeline is Sweeping by
Speaker 1: Sarah Shoon Leen Binnum, which is a very dreamy book anyway,
Speaker 1: It's like a dream within a dream with all this
Speaker 1: surreal stuff happening. And then on top of that, I
Speaker 1: was a little loopy um from everything else that was
Speaker 1: going on. But one of the characters that shows up
Speaker 1: is a fart artist or a fartist if you will,
Speaker 1: or a flatest or a flatty wist, but not a flattist,
Speaker 1: not a flautist. That's uh, that's something that's something different entirely.
Speaker 1: But turns out there's one individual that was a particular
Speaker 1: note and it was this was a Frenchman whose real
Speaker 1: name was Joseph Pugel Uh lived eight fifty seven to five,
Speaker 1: but his stage name was Domain Uh, and he was
Speaker 1: known for having remarkable control over his abdominal muscles and
Speaker 1: uh he seemed to be able to just fart at will,
Speaker 1: just NonStop, just well beyond the three coke cans of
Speaker 1: flatists that any normal individual could could muster. But there
Speaker 1: was a secret to what he could actually do. Um
Speaker 1: he Uh. He had again phenomenal control over the muscles
Speaker 1: down there, particularly the anal sphincter muscles, and he could
Speaker 1: actually inhale air through the shincter and then release it.
Speaker 1: So he wasn't that he was releasing gas that was
Speaker 1: built up as part of this natural farting process that
Speaker 1: we've discussed in this episode. Rather he was inhaling air
Speaker 1: into the rectum and then releasing it again. Wow. So
Speaker 1: we talked about reverse feeding in our last podcast. Yeah, yeah, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like if you've ever been generally you'll
Speaker 1: occasionally count our kid who's doing this where they'll burp
Speaker 1: over and over again because they're inhaling the air and
Speaker 1: then they're brobing inhaling the air, and then burping. He
Speaker 1: was doing the same thing, but with his bottom. I
Speaker 1: would love to tell some stories about my family, but
Speaker 1: I don't think that would be correct. All I can
Speaker 1: say is that I think maybe in past generations we've
Speaker 1: had some artists excellent. So anyway, on that note, we
Speaker 1: should probably bring closure to this. Yes, let's let's call
Speaker 1: over the robot. Well, that was a robotic fart, I know,
Speaker 1: but really, I mean, I thought this was a really
Speaker 1: classy episode on farts, and here Arnie had to come
Speaker 1: and stick up the joint. It doesn't really smell. I
Speaker 1: mean it just it smells like a train passing in
Speaker 1: a subway or something, you know, kind of not really,
Speaker 1: but don't do it again. Okay, here's some mail from
Speaker 1: our robot. This one is from Adam Adam Rights, and
Speaker 1: he's for solving to responding to our episode Eating Alive,
Speaker 1: where we talked about the prospect of being swallowed whole
Speaker 1: by a sperm whale. And he says, Okay, let's say
Speaker 1: I was swallowed whole by a whale. I'm alive and
Speaker 1: uninjured in the pre stomach. The situation looks grim, but
Speaker 1: alas all hope is not lost, because how did I
Speaker 1: get there. I was inspecting a gaping maw of a
Speaker 1: giant whale while scuba diving. I have a full tank
Speaker 1: of air and a very sharp dive knife, as does
Speaker 1: any diver. Worth is salt and a healthy desire to live.
Speaker 1: What are my chances of jabbing and slicing my way
Speaker 1: to freedom? Slim to none? Well, uh, yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: tough one because certainly, those the squid that are being
Speaker 1: swallowed by the sperm whale, they have rather tough beaks,
Speaker 1: so they don't have any bones otherwise, so they can
Speaker 1: kind of they're sort of jelatinous in the way that
Speaker 1: they can contort their bodies. Yeah, but they could they
Speaker 1: have the ability to to use that beak on the predator.
Speaker 1: They're able to to use their their their little suction
Speaker 1: cups with the with the the sharp things. And then
Speaker 1: you see the scars and the sides of sperm whales
Speaker 1: where they've they've suckered and and and picked at them,
Speaker 1: and well that's creates the amber kies right there. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then yeah, and then of course once they passed
Speaker 1: the the beaks on they we discussed in that episode
Speaker 1: end up scarring the side of the intestinal walls. So
Speaker 1: I don't I feel like if you were too to
Speaker 1: try to use that knife and fight your way out,
Speaker 1: that you're just it's gonna cause the sperm whale to
Speaker 1: really gnash its teeth even more. Yeah, and and chaos
Speaker 1: wouldn't sue. Yeah, No, it hasn't already. Yeah, I'm thinking that.
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly you're not going to cut your way out.
Speaker 1: I guess the only the only possibility here was if
Speaker 1: you somehow create enough of the disturbance to where it
Speaker 1: vomits you. Oh right, if you could just stick your
Speaker 1: finger down its throat. Yeah, Or I think I think
Speaker 1: Pinocchio escaped by started they started a little fire, right,
Speaker 1: and the smoke builds up, and then then the creature
Speaker 1: sneezes everyone free. So this is kind of you. Obviously
Speaker 1: you're not going to start a fire in there, um,
Speaker 1: but if you were to stab away and start stabbing
Speaker 1: the size, would you possibly be able to get those
Speaker 1: firm let us pit you up? Well, I tend to
Speaker 1: doubt it. If you had a little pocket of poison,
Speaker 1: but then you're going to expose yourself to that poison
Speaker 1: as well. Right, I'm trying to think of ways that
Speaker 1: you could make it regurgitate. I don't know. I bet,
Speaker 1: I bet you guys out there might have some idea.
Speaker 1: Think it over. I would like to to hear some
Speaker 1: people's thoughts and man and hey, mate, you know, if
Speaker 1: you get a spare moment here and there, maybe I'll
Speaker 1: try and contact an expert on this. Someone who's survived
Speaker 1: thinks walled by the way. All you all right? There
Speaker 1: you go. Everything you may or may not have wanted
Speaker 1: to know about cutting the cheese, breaking the wind, crop dusting,
Speaker 1: farting latest my friends. Um, if you would like to
Speaker 1: know more about some of the episodes that we create,
Speaker 1: and I'm talking about podcast episodes as well as video,
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